Technical Field
The present invention relates to data center management and, more particularly, to integrated housing, sensing, and control devices to integrate and streamline broad management tasks.
Description of the Related Art
Data center operators find it useful to track certain information regarding their spaces. For example, quantities such as temperature and power consumption provide convenient and intuitive metrics for the operating conditions of the data center. As data centers grow and become harder to manage, obtaining fine-grained feedback becomes exponentially more difficult. Temperatures can vary significantly across a large data center, with devices that have a higher workload generating more heat. Meanwhile, power consumption information for individual clients can be helpful in identifying clients with high needs. To obtain this fine-grained information, many sensors are employed and distributed throughout the data center.
A further factor that data centers are concerned with is asset management. Maintaining a large data center involves keeping track of many individual pieces of equipment. It is difficult to keep a listing of such devices up to date, as equipment may be added and removed frequently, or even simply moved from one location to another. As an example, if a particular server is taken down for repair, this fact should be recorded. To accomplish this, data centers use asset management tags and then collate that information into an up-to-date database.
However, these different systems are all maintained separately and use separate infrastructure. The result of this is a large duplication of effort, as separate devices and communication lines are installed for every kind of sensor. Furthermore, maintaining separate infrastructures for each type of sensing complicates the physical organization of the data center, as the presence of additional cables provides additional possible points of failure.